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Want more from your Rich Text editor? Here’s DelightEd 1.0

I’m DelightEd version 1.0 release.

DelightEd is a full-featured but uncluttered Rich Text editor with some unique features. For many Mac users, it should prove your RTF editor of choice.

It works beautifully in Light Mode, with live word and character counts at the foot of the window. The word count is obtained from its spell checker, which counts compounds like com.apple.TimeMachine and URLs as single words. By default, spell checking is turned off, so you won’t suffer lots of irritating underlinings unless you choose to.

Support for appearances in Mojave is where it really comes into its own. It features a full Dark Mode, unlike most other Rich Text editors which blind you with their fixed white backgrounds.

It also offers two lower-contrast modes which some find preferable to the normal extreme black and white.

You can switch the whole app into whichever mode you prefer, irrespective of system settings. It doesn’t have a large and complex set of preferences: instead, just set the font and size you want as the default for new windows, and use the Save Defaults command.

Not only can you switch the whole app between Light and Dark modes whenever you wish, but individual windows can be switched instantly. This makes it much quicker and easier to check that your documents render correctly in each mode, and to take screenshots.

Editing commands make it easy to paste in styled text from other editors, like TextEdit or word processors, without upsetting DelightEd’s special dual-mode text, using Paste and Match Style. You can also create and maintain links embedded in your text.

Most Rich Text editors don’t support text which looks good in both Light and Dark modes (‘bi-modal text’). DelightEd comes with this built into every document you produce. To help remove text colouring which can break that, the Endarken command sets all your text in bi-modal form, and Enlighten replaces bi-modal colouring with plain, fixed black just like TextEdit.

DelightEd supports sophisticated style libraries which preserve bi-modal properties, and comes with a crafted property list to help even TextEdit work better in Mojave.

It also has its own Help window which explains all these valuable features.

DelightEd is ideal for developers who wish to create bi-modal styled text to paste into an NSTextView, anyone who needs to create Rich Text which displays correctly in both modes, and everyone who writes in Rich Text.

It’s free, runs on Sierra and later (although Dark Mode features are only available in Mojave), is notarized for your added security, and available from here: DelightEd10
and from Downloads above.

Great to have the full release. Have a few requests and a puzzling issue with “Paste and Match Style”.

I would like to set the default to have a particular font (Liberation Mono), 13 point and 1.1 linespacing. Only the font and size are save as default but not the linespacing. Is it feasible to include linespacing as a default? Could the default new page window size be increased slightly wider so that the linespacing menu item is visible?

The help file in Delighted is very informative and useful. I wanted to save it as a separate rtf file. When I selected all the text in the help file and did Paste and Match style into a new window I got this:https://i.imgur.com/xUZB2Z7.jpg

I use an app called Paste which stores multiple clipboards and shows the multicolored help file::
Using Paste to directly paste into a new Delighted window gives a full copy of the help file:
Per Aron D. post above, pasting using Paste into a TextEdit new window gives the same full copy as above. I noted that if one changes the default in TextEdit from RFT to Text, then the paste looks like the Delighted paste using Paste and Match style.

None of this is meant to be critical of DelightEd, but rather some observations that perhaps are useful.

Thank you, Phil.
I’ll have look at your suggestions and hopefully catch them in the next update, perhaps next week.
I’m not sure what Paste is doing, but it doesn’t seem to be handling the Rich Text data correctly there, stripping all the styling. It might be worth mentioning to its developer.
Howard.

Ah no: I’ve just re-read your original comment.
You don’t want to use “Paste and Match Style”, but “Paste” when you want to preserve styling. The former pastes the text in the current style, stripping all the styling. To preserve the styling, use Paste instead. This is a general convention in Cocoa apps, not mine.
Howard.

Actually Paste the application is the only way to preserve colors and multiple font sizes. To me it seems the copy/paste within DelitEd is not working correctly. As I mentioned the first two figures/links need to be switched to understand what I was saying.

Sorry, I have no intention of supporting plain text files in DelightEd. I am thinking about offering HTML export, though, although I’m still looking into that.
There are dozens of superb plain text editors available for macOS. I strongly recommend BBEdit. Editing plain and Rich Text is so different, and of course there are no issues whatsoever with displaying plain text in Light or Dark Mode. I’d much prefer to continue to improve its Rich Text features, which are so often lacking in other editors, even Microsoft Word.
Howard.

Any possibility of implementing linespacing as part of the Save Defaults menu item? I also just realized that the current version of LockRattler has a Save as text button. Given that Delighted will not work with text only, could the button be changed to “Save as RTF”?

Thanks, Phil.
I have been looking at this to the point where it has been driving me slightly crazy. One thing you can do is save the paragraph style, which includes the line spacing, as a style, but applying that to Rich Text is no simpler than setting the line spacing!
I’m very reluctant to start saving LockRattler output as RTF, as it isn’t styled text, so would need a default style applied to it, which would just result in the same problem.
Maybe a useful additional feature for DelightEd would be the ability to import text, which some have asked for, but you’d have the same problem of having to set its line spacing after import, again.
I’ll have another go in the crazy world of line spacing in DelightEd and see what I can come up with. It really is frustrating, as the little documentation that there is appears to be misleading (i.e. nothing works as I think it should). Perhaps I am missing something, or just need a fresh inspired guess.
Very best wishes to you too for Christmas.
Howard.